Daron Acemoglu: Paul Revere of the robot revolution

Imposing in size and resembling a retired linebacker more than the MIT economist that he is, Daron Acemoglu has built the reputation of an iconoclast. Over the last five years, he has taken on the grasping leaders of the world's failed nations, and, most recently, automation.

In March, Acemoglu, along with Boston University's Pascual Restrepo, made waves with a paper that described industrial robots punching a hole in employment and wage growth, and potentially costing millions of more jobs by 2025. While challenging the orthdoxy, the paper immediately became central to the early scholarship on the new wave of robotization. Policymakers, fellow economists and journalists rely on his core conclusion — that each robot will cost three to six jobs.

His central message: "History is not uniform," Acemoglu tells Axios: Technological development tends to bring broad prosperity, but that is not a law of nature. "The industrial revolution didn't lead to higher wages for many years between 1760 and 1850," and if it weren't for democratization, the rise of labor unions, and universal education, it may never have.

Since 2011, Acemoglu has been mentioned regularly as a candidate for the Nobel Prize. I spoke with him twice — at MIT and, in a catchup chat last week, by phone. Unsurprisingly, his office is lined with books, history next to economics, including stacks of Why Nations Fail, the 2012 work that he co-authored with the University of Chicago's James Robinson. That's the one that, challenging the theory of Jared Diamond and others, said nations fail not because of culture, history or geography, but simply because their leaders prefer to loot; there simply isn't the institutional strength to pull the country through bad leadership.

Acemoglu earned his Ph.D at the London School of Economics, but the most important economics lesson leading to his theory about the prosperity of nations came while growing up under the Turkish military dictatorship in the 1980s. He witnessed that the purpose of many institutions was not to do its job or make sure people were treated equally, but to extract wealth from the population.

What he grasped: Winning nations — the key determinant of a country's prosperity — are inclusive, having universal property rights and democratic forms of government.

But Acemoglu worries that these institutions in the U.S. and Europe are under attack. One of the enemies at the gate: technology. It's a conclusion he would not have made ten or fifteen years ago. "Economists are trained to think of technology as always increasing employment and raising wages," he says by phone, "but there's no theoretical justification for believing this."

Robinson — his Why Nations Fail collaborator — met Acemoglu during a lecture Robinson was giving at LSE. Acemoglu sat in the front row and peppered Robinson with questions and challenges to his assumptions. (Thomas Piketty, the rockstar economist and author of Capital in the 21st Century, sat just a few seats down.).

The two went to dinner afterward, and a decade of collaboration followed. Robinson says what sets Acemoglu apart is the breadth of his curiosity: "His house is filled to the brim with books on all sorts of topics. Few economists have read half what he's read." Says his MIT colleague Joshua Angrist, "Daron breathed life into the field of political economy."

Lessons from the industrial revolution: Acemoglu saw that advancing technology did little to raise the prosperity of the common man. Now, it's important that everyone be engaged. "There's a real mismatch between our institutions and the technologies coming on board," he says. He calls for a menu of changes:

The working homeless isn't just a tech bubble problem

The working homeless are an international problem. Here, day laborers in Osaka, Japan. Tomohiro Ohsumi / Bloomberg via Getty Images

In big cities across the U.S., thousands of people trudge off to work in the morning but, lacking enough money for sky-high rent, are living at night in homeless shelters, cars, RVs, side streets and parking lots, often with their entire family.

Quick take: For a couple of months, we have heard about the problem of working homelessness in the tech hubs of Seattle and San Francisco. But there is a similar plight in Dallas, New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.

An invisible problem: Cities only rarely keep track of their local working homeless, and the federal government does not collate raw data that could more sharply define the scale of the problem. To write this story, we called to agencies, shelters and experts around the nation.

Jason Leopold, a researcher at the Urban Institute, said the percentage of homeless people who work may be close to 25%, maybe a little more. Megan Hustings, director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, suggested higher percentages — 40% to 60% of the homeless float in and out of both part- and full-time work, she said.

Here are our top findings:

Washington, D.C.: 22% of homeless single adults and 32% of adults in homeless families are employed, according to a 2017 report by the Washington Council of Governments. The city has 11,128 homeless people, according to official figures.

New York: About 70% of the city's approximately 60,000 people living in homeless shelters are families, and 34% of the families include a working adult, Arianna Fishman of the city's Department of Human Services tells Axios. Women in Need, the city's largest provider of shelter, said that 53% of the homeless moms in its residences are working.

Baltimore: In a Point in Time count on Jan. 22, 6% of the 546 people who were not staying in shelters said they were employed.

Chicago: In aPoint in Time survey on Jan. 26, 25% of the 4,100 homeless people in shelters said they were employed.

Boston: 42% of homeless people 18-25 years old in Suffolk County were employed, according to the 2016 Massachusetts Youth Count.

New Haven, CT: About a third of the 160 homeless families served by Melville Charitable Trust in New Haven, CT, are working, according to Becca Allen, a program officer; a quarter of them have some college education and 43% graduated high school.

Mariam Nek, director of the AimHire program at Friendship Place in Washington, D.C., said the working homeless range in former circumstances. One man she helped was a “very successful loan banker … [who] lost everything because of the financial crisis" and lived out of his car, she said.

Over time, Nek said, people who are homeless and working figure out “a way to deal with 'where do I go to shower? Where do I keep my stuff when I go to my job?'" because they have to when they can't afford to pay rent.

The Heartland Alliance offers housing and training programs so people can get on their feet. But Nancy Phillips, senior director of Heartland's Pathways to Success Initiatives, said “sometimes people won't even say that they're homeless on the first meeting ... because they're worried that we won't let them into the training program."

Sobering numbers: The National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) reports that to afford a two-bedroom rental unit in the U.S. in 2017, renters need to earn $21.21 per hour on average. That's $13.96 higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25. It's $4.83 higher than the average hourly national wage, $16.38.

“In no state in the entire country can a family working full time at minimum wage afford an average apartment."— Becca Allen of the Melville Charitable Trust

Microsoft taps AI, Reddit to make Bing smarter

Microsoft announced a bunch of new partnerships Wednesday as it aims to show itself as a leader in the field of artificial intelligence. It's also adding a bunch of AI-powered features to its own products, including its Bing search engine along with a deep integration of content from Reddit.

Why it matters: AI is one of the hottest areas in tech and Microsoft is competing with Google, Facebook, IBM and others for talent, mindshare and deals.

Partnerships: Microsoft announced efforts with a range of companies, including Reddit, UPS and China's Cheetah Mobile. In the Reddit deal, Microsoft's Bing search engine will use content from the online discussion community, including its popular "Ask Me Anything" Q&As.

Internal efforts

On the Bing front, Microsoft is using AI to deliver answers that combine information from multiple sites. That can allow results that compare different arguments on an issue, explore the differences between two things or just deliver a summary of facts from more than one place, with footnotes showing where the information came from. It is also making Bing more conversational and allowing people to search within images.

With Cortana, Microsoft is trying to help its digital assistant stand out from a crowded pack that includes Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant and Amazon's Alexa. Microsoft's case is that it is the only digital assistant that stretches across work and personal life. To that end, Microsoft said Cortana can now understand calendar and other data from Google's Gmail. It's also building Cortana into Android apps, including the CM Launcher app from China's Cheetah Mobile.

Microsoft is also expanding its use of AI in Office 365. A new insights feature will automatically make charts showing trends within a complex spreadsheet. Within word, AI will help make sense of acronyms within a document using other documents within the company. Microsoft already prioritizes which e-mails to read first, but a new feature will help find the action items within Outlook.

The debate over inequality

Last week, we reported that the wage inequality gap in the U.S., a primary source of the polarization among Americans, has been shrinking: For five straight quarters, wages have been growing the most for U.S. workers with only a high school diploma.

"Surely you're kidding?" wrote James Harvey, executive director of the National Superintendents Roundtable. The percentage wage increase is better for high school graduates, he said, but the dollar increase still favors the rich: a 3.3% raise for someone making $20,000 a year is $660—only an eighth of the $5,000 raise going to someone earning $500,000 and getting a 1% increase.

In a phone call, Upwork CEO Stephane Kasriel told me, "The 1% is doing a lot better, and for the 30% and 40% at the bottom, it keeps getting worse."

Quick take: The times do indisputably favor the rich:

When adjusted for inflation,U.S. wages are up only 10% from almost a half-century ago.

Meanwhile, wealth held by the top 1% has surged: it rose to 38.6% of the total in 2016, from 36.3% in 2013, the Fed said in a report in September, while the bottom 90%'s wealth has fallen for almost three decades—last year, it was 22.8% of the total, compared with 33.2% in 1989.

And Charlie Allenson, a FoW reader in New York, made another point: "Many of those chronically not working are not getting back to work. Namely, those more 'mature' workers. Ageism rolls on. Personal example: People look at my website and love my work. They meet me, see the gray hair and suddenly they're going in a 'different direction.' This is a constant for me. And it sucks."

But there are in fact signs of an improvement in the fortunes of ordinary people, and wages and salaries are among them, says Jed Kolko, chief economist at Indeed.com, the jobs listing website, who wrote the blog post on which we were reporting. In an email exchange, Kolko told me:

Harvey and Kasriel are correct to single out the vast concentration of income at the top, comprised largely of non-wage earnings like capital gains, interest and dividends—which combined are how the wealthy make most of their money.

But wages earned for work are another lens into the inequality story, and in that realm, the gap indeed has narrowed.

The shrinking wage gap is important to watch because wages and salaries are a large component of pre-tax money income, which includes interest, dividends and income from property. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the proportion at 76.8%. (see pages 8-9 in this BLS report).

The Fed, too, has noted the trend favoring less-educated workers. According to a Fed report released in September, income rose from 2013 through 2016 for all income groups, after accounting for inflation, which was a change from the prior three years, when income was stagnant. But the highest growth — an average of 25% — was among families without a high school diploma; in the 2010 to 2013 period, income fell for these workers, the Fed said.

Thought bubble: Inequality is not an absolute metric. If it were, ordinary people could legitimately lash out about wealth at the top regardless of how they themselves were faring. The rise of wages at the bottom and in the middle is slow, and the trend could halt—that is a point that Kolko makes. But it remains notable that the numbers are no longer going only in one, inexorable direction—there are metrics pointing to growing wages and salaries, and more jobs, for those whom the economy has been leaving behind.

Bitcoin: 'This is a casino, not an investment'

Illustration: Lazaro Gamio / Axios

Bitcoin is up about 1,700% since the start of the year. Some attribute the surge to ordinary, if enthusiastic, investment, along with the forces of supply and demand. Others say it's a bubble, and that it will ultimately burst. Joe Borg, president of the North American Securities Administrators Association, a grouping of state securities officials, suggests it's the latter. "This is a casino," he tells Axios, "not an investment."

The bottom line: Borg, who is also director of the Alabama Securities Commission, says he could be wrong and that those who say bitcoin is just "another type of investment" will be proven correct. But he sees worrying signs of a classic investment mania.

People have told him they have taken out home equity lines of credit to buy bitcoin.

Those doing so, he said, are mostly millennials and young baby boomers.

"They seem to think anything electronic is a game," Borg said. "There are entrepreneurs who run Facebook, and they put this in the same category."

Thought bubble: If bitcoin collapses, which has been the normal course in big, sudden investment manias, the price is highly unlikely to go to zero, meaning a lot of people will still be in the money. But lots of people will lose, too, including perhaps some who have taken out those home equity lines of credit.

That there is a fever is indisputable. It is global, and especially heavy in Asia. Ordinary South Koreans are the most aggressive bitcoin investors, in addition to Hong Kong Chinese, Japanese and Vietnamese, report the WSJ's Steven Russolillo and Eun-Young Jeong. Together, they account for almost 80% of global bitcoin trading. Other reminders of fevers past:

Most of these Asians buying bitcoin are the general public, not professional traders.

At the point last week when bitcoin went above $17,000, it was almost $25,000 in South Korea, almost 50% higher, the WSJ said. In other words, the trade is chaotic to the point of irrationality.

At the FT, Izabella Kaminska writes today that even central banks are "getting drunk on the collective cryptocurrency/blockchain Kool-Aid."

A point that increasing numbers of observers are making is that bitcoin is only an investment, with no other real-life, large-scale utility, at least at present: bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are too slow and cumbersome to serve as money, their original purpose.

In a speech today in Sydney, Phillip Lowe, the governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, makes the point: "The current fascination with these currencies feels more like a speculative mania than it has to do with their use as an efficient and convenient form of electronic payment."

This robot went to college

Bina48 graduates in the philosophy of love. Photo courtesy William Barry.

Bina48 appears to be the world's first robot college student. Along with 31 classmates, she took a 16-week course this fall in the philosophy of love, taught at Notre Dame de Namur University, in Belmont, CA, graduating with a grade of "superior quality." ​

Quick take: William Barry, who taught the class and worked with Bina48's artificial intelligence developers to make her ready for college rigor, says the aim was to improve the robot's ability to "communicate and build rapport with human classmates." Some students might start with apprehensions about AI, but Barry wanted Bina48 to dispel them. "We wanted to start the conversation with students not from a place of experiential fear, but as a place of opportunity," he said. "We're teaching an artificial intelligence about how we want it to help us in the flourishing of humanity."

How it works:Bina48 was designed to "learn" by capturing a mosaic of general knowledge that any college student would have — what Barry calls "mind files" — in addition to specific information about the course. Along the way last semester, Bina48 was able to modify her store of knowledge in line with what she was learning, Barry said.

The course went something like this:

Bina48 could listen in classes held by Skype, and reply with a voice.

When a subject arose, she would peruse her mind file and figure out where the class conversation was going. "It's not like she's reading from a script and then repeats it back," Barry said.

Among her classwork, Bina48 participated in a debate with students at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The subject: the use of nonlethal weapons in warfare.

What's next: Bina48 is signed up for an "ethics of emerging technologies" course next semester.

Working dogs: People buy when canines are selling

Illustration: Rebecca Zisser / Axios

For several years, dogs have been among the biggest stars on Instagram, with hundreds of thousands of followers and enormous advertising deals. The reason? Many Instagram users trust dogs more than human models.

Why it matters: In an age where brands and platforms are radically rethinking how ads are produced and delivered to consumers, "animal influencers," as the ad industry calls them, produce sponsored content that people actually choose to follow and engage with. “People are going to get ads — whether it's banner ads, whether it's influencer ads," Loni Edwards, founder of The Dog Agency, tells Axios. "But they want to see them in a way that's going to make them smile."

Edwards cites an "incredibly powerful" campaign that she did for Urban Decay, a makeup brand, involving numerous pet influencers. “It was about how Urban Decay doesn't test on animals, and it's about putting that message next to these pets that people already have a strong connection to," she said. Urban Decay did not respond to an email.

And there are ways to expand: The Dog Agency has its own pet content site called Pet Insider, and last month sponsored "PetCon," a weekend pet-focused convention in New York based around some of the agency's most famous animal influencers.

Why it connects: While animal influencers first came to prominence promoting pet-friendly products like Barkbox, a monthly dog-focused subscription service, the most prominent influencers today tend to work closely with human models. One approach is to embed an ad from a known human personality within a photo of an animal who consumers have already chosen to follow, and thereby get people not only to view the ad, but like and comment on it as well.

Animal influencers get more attention than human bloggers, Edwards said. Clients see the results. "By partnering with [animal influencers]," she said, "they're really resonating with their consumers on a deeper level"

One of the stars: Elle Drouin is owner of Mochi, a 3-year-old maltipoo who just cracked 100,000 Instagram followers. She said it's not uncommon for a single Instagram post to earn $1,000 (around $100 for every 10,000 followers). “Mochi definitely earns more then her keep," she told Axios. "She pays for herself and then some."

Drouin works, too: Drouin estimates that she works three to five hours a week on Mochi's brand. “I was sitting in my office," she said, "and I realized that I had spent two hours responding to emails for my dog."

Alibaba is crushing Amazon in transforming offline shopping

Alibaba founder Jack Ma. Photo: Natacha Pisarenko / AP

Amazon has introduced high-profile experiments in offline retail in recent quarters, like the cashier-less Amazon Go, or its new brick-and-mortar book stores, but Fortune reports that Alibaba is "further along the online-to-off-line curve than its U.S. doppelgänger."

China's retail sector was in its infancy by the time e-commerce was introduced to the country during the 2000s, and consumers and retailers latched on to tools like Alibaba's online marketplace rather than waiting for or investing in an efficient network of stores.

What's next: Alibaba is now pouring profits into its New Retail initative, whereby it sells services to offline retailers that will make them more efficient and attractive to China's growing middle class.

According to Fortune's Adam Lashinsky, "The purest manifestation of Alibaba's online/off-line ambitions is Hema," a bricks-and-mortar grocery store that accepts orders via app, and promises delivery within 30 minutes and a 5-kilometer radius.

The firm's experiments in cashierless checkout systems and augmented reality are arguably further along than those at American firms like Amazon and eBay.

Dali Yang, a Chinese-born political scientist at the University of Chicago tells Fortune that offline retail helps support domestic jobs, which " pleases employment-conscious Chinese government officials."

Target says that it expects to offer same-day delivery services at around half of its stores by early 2018 and at a majority of its stores by the 2018 holiday season. Full deployment across all major product categories would come by the end of 2019.

Shipt had raised around $65 million in venture capital funding from firms like Greycroft Partners, e.ventures, and Harbert Venture Partners. The Birmingham, Ala.-based company currently has a network of more than 20,000 personal shoppers in 72 markets, and will continue to run independently.

Some additional color from Ian Sigalow, a Greycroft partner and Shipt director:

Target CEO Brian Cornell flew down to Birmingham and did a test drive with a Shipt delivery person.

Expect Target to particularly leverage Shipt when it comes to fresh food offerings, as Shipt currently focuses on grocery.

The original conversations between Target and Shipt were about a business partnership.

Google is opening an AI center in China

Google is setting up an artificial intelligence research facility in China, the company said on Wednesday.

​Why it matters:​ China is looking to become a bigger player in artificial intelligence. And Google — along with other Silicon Valley companies — is looking to gain a foothold in China, where it has had limited operations since 2010. "I believe AI and its benefits have no borders," said Fei-Fei Li, an AI expert who will be one of the leaders of the new center, in a company blog post.

Charming Charlie becomes 20th major retailer to file for bankruptcy this year

Charming Charlie, the Houston-based jewelry and accessories retailer, announced Tuesday that it reached an agreement with lenders and equity sponsors to clear the way for its filing of Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

What went wrong: Charming Charlie's bread-and-butter, affordable jewlery, is an ideal product for online sellers, given that it can be warehoused and shipped cheaply. What's more, even as business migrated online, Charming Charlie overextended itself, opening 79 stores between 2013 and 2015.

Charming Charlie burst onto the retail scene in 2004, with stores uniquely organized by color, and offering products at prices between high-end jewlery stores and discount shops like Claire's, which is aimed at the teenage market.